Acousmatics Behind the Veil

The past month I must have listened more actively and concretely than I have before, hoping to find the ideal forms of sound to speak of during this paper. Almost all that I have heard speaks to me in different ways, but the topic of today’s writing is all about acousmatics and reduced listening of Pierre Schaffer’s Etude aux Chemins de Fer and Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rien no. 1.

I chose Pierre Schaffer because I wanted to understand his process of reduced listening and how it applies to the basics of Music Concrete. After listening, I felt I could appreciate the sampling aspects of his work to some of the music I currently listen to, namely psychedelic rock artists such as Neutral Milk Hotel, Laurie Anderson, and the more Avant-guard pieces of The Doors. Frank Zappa is closely related, but I find him a little too grating these days. I also felt he did not entirely fit with acousmatic sampling I linked to with Schaffer and Ferrari, but more with Stockhausen’s Kontakte or early Yoko Ono.

Luc Ferrari’s piece Presque Rien no. 1 impacted me deeply. It was the closest I have come to understand the Kantian principle of Ding an Sich, or the Noumenon philosophy of an object being a thing-in-itself. The acousmatic representation takes away all reality of the things that produced those sounds, yet they exist anonymously through diffused air vibrations.

My process for listening was simple. Each night around 3 am I would wake up on my days off and listen to a different piece of work through Sennheiser headphones that I use to do my video editing and lab work. I wanted to research at 3 am because I have found that this is the quietest time in my busy neighborhood.

Similar to my experience of watching In the City of Silvia, the tonal elements began to flood and merge. Faint sounds from the street bled through and became a part of the piece. It became hard to know what Rien was and what the Bronx was, yet it also did not matter as much. Some elements were evident such as the clucking chickens or French voices, but others were more non-descript and could easily live within the thing-ness of the work.

It was around eight minutes and fifteen seconds when I was transported to another time and place through the reduced listening of cicadas. I became acutely aware of my surroundings, not being in the fifth-floor Bronx apartment but living as a small child inside my country home, where each night, the sounds of a babbling brook and a symphony of cicadas lulled me to sleep. Lying awake now, nearly 28 years later, to the similar sounds of my youth put me as close as it has ever been possible to this lost childhood experience, but it also produced something else entirely.

I have an aging woman that I live with and care for. To me, this woman means everything – the last connection to my late father, an adoring mother-like figure, a chance to love and care for someone in need – and with the pandemic, I have noticed a steep decline in her health. Previously able-bodied now she sleeps most of the day except for her meal and bath times. I visit with her, and occasionally we will do things together like art projects, but mostly she sleeps.

Through my conversations with her, she has told me that she has stopped listening to music and has begun writing down notes about the various things that she hears. My footsteps to the kitchen during the night when she is groggily half asleep, the distorted and muffled elements of the TV from the apartment above us, sometimes she will catch a snippet of conversation for someone in the hallway, etc. I realized that this is also the Thing-In-Itselfness that Rein and Schaeffer have captured through their audio experimentations. By Rein and Schaeffer placing a veil in front of me, I could at last, grasp the music of the concrete.